On a daily basis, at around the same time each day (early morning and early afternoon), my computer stops being able to access google or any sites that use google code (including sites that use google adsense, google api, blogspot, youtube, google itself). This persists until I reboot my computer. I have a laptop on the same network, using the same router, which is able to access these sites just fine, but it's an old laptop and can only access the web in elinks so I want to use the internet from this computer instead.

Based on the output of mtr, I'm experiencing 50% packet loss, 16 hops in the direction of google. My best guess is that rebooting the computer causes it to take a different path to google, bypassing the node that's causing me trouble. Is there anyway to get it to do that without having to reboot?

I had to reboot to ask this question because stackexchange uses google api too, but I'm sure I'll have the problem again later today, as I do every day. I looked at mtr again, and I'm getting no packet loss (as expected after reboot), and it doesn't take a path through 216.239.47.* which is the node that was giving me trouble.

Is this specific to Google? Do you get the same IP address when you reboot?
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GillesJul 13 '12 at 23:25

@Gilles I have a dynamic IP address, but it doesn't seem to change every time I reboot (just checked it). It would probably change if I rebooted my router or if I disconnected and reconnected to the internet within my router's page. The problem is specific to google, but has been going on for over a year now so it's unlikely to be a local outage. Google owns half the internet so when I have this problem, I lose access to most of the web. Because it's not 100% packet loss, if I increase my timeouts in my browser, I can sometimes get a google hosted page to load with a lot of refreshes.
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JoshuaJul 14 '12 at 18:32

@Gilles For sites that are entirely on google's servers (google itself, blogspot, youtube), that's the best I can do. For sites like stackexchange that use google api, I can access them with limited functionality by adblocking ajax.googleapis.com/* and google's ad javascript. (On stackexchange with googleapi adblocked I can read but not comment/login/ask & answer questions)
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JoshuaJul 14 '12 at 18:37

This comment didn't notify dadinck, you need to leave it below his answer. These services shouldn't matter (but then your symptoms are unusual). The code for the ARP cache flush looks correct, are you sure you didn't make a typo?
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GillesJul 14 '12 at 19:23

oh, thanks; I've moved the comment. I might've made an error when I copypasted it earlier, so I'll try it again next time I have the problem.
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JoshuaJul 14 '12 at 19:40

Thanks for the link on flushing out my DNS. Unfortunately, my computer doesn't seem to have any of those services. The only services I have running right now (just after reboot) are openbsd-inetd, pulseaudio, saned, and winbind. I'll try restarting openbsd-inetd next time the problem occurs to see if that does anything. The code you gave for clearing my arpcache gave: bash: syntax error near unexpected token `do'
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JoshuaJul 14 '12 at 19:34

I figured out what I was doing wrong: i was typing sudo before that command and it gave me the error. I had to use sudo bash and then it worked fine. I set my DNS to 8.8.8.8 in my router and I've flushed my arp cache. Still no google unfortunately, but thanks for trying to help.
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JoshuaJul 16 '12 at 16:07

I've been having the same problem for a long time now and still couldn't figure out exactly why. Not only does it happen to my PC, it also happens to my mobile devices connected to the same network. Why is this happening?